A little OT, but related to current events: Detroit, which has been facing fiscal problems, has enjoyed a drop in crime even though budget deficits has forced the city to cut hundreds of officers:
How to reconcile these things? Is crime really falling, or have reporting standards changed? Or, if cops can't respond to reports, do the reports ever get filed?
1. 'urban lead' is a studied off-shoot of the lead hypothesis. Detroit's lead situation is a studied and known problem. So lingering crime in Detroit is actually expected under the lead hypothesis. Particularly as the population shrinks and the remaining citizen 'average' shifts poorer, with a more-toxic environment.
2. 'structural' crime. Opportunists considering theft as a means to an end might be dissuaded as the risk/reward equation shifts. But convincing a (drug) gang that it's no longer a good idea to murder a rat/rival is much more difficult.
3. Detroit's shrinking police coverage. The police department has explicitly warned people away from certain areas of the city, because they don't have the resources to provide effective coverage. This can only be interpreted as an 'opportunity' for structural crime.
Criminologists understand that crime moves in waves, and different crimes move differently. Crime overall might be down, but a particular class of crimes might have risen.
This is not an unusual state of affairs, but the news for the general public has no interest in educating people on this topic - after all, they need something with which to excoriate politicians; something will usually be 'on the rise', so politicians will be 'failing' in the whole field.
http://news.yahoo.com/detroit-crime-down-murder-rate-1736002...
And yet the murder rate is relatively stagnant, and this year reached a peak: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/04/16352612-weve-los...
How to reconcile these things? Is crime really falling, or have reporting standards changed? Or, if cops can't respond to reports, do the reports ever get filed?